The decision had been made. The rhetoric had been deployed. At approximately 05:34 UTC, explosions lit up the Baghdad skyline in a campaign termed ‘Shock and Awe.’ This was not the start, but a culmination. Ground forces from the US, UK, Australia, and Poland had already begun moving across the Kuwaiti border into Iraq hours earlier.
The public justification, presented repeatedly at the United Nations and in televised addresses, was the imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s alleged stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. The intelligence was presented as a mosaic, a collection of fragments that formed a picture of certainty for some and a pattern of doubt for others. The legal authority was a congressional resolution from October 2002, citing the 1991 Gulf War ceasefire and the post-9/11 authorization for the use of military force.
The invasion itself was a swift military success. Regime forces, degraded by years of sanctions and no-fly zones, collapsed within weeks. But the stated casus belli—the WMDs—proved elusive. The subsequent search, led by the Iraq Survey Group, would conclude they did not exist in any militarily significant capacity. The event marked a pivot in international order, redefining preemptive war, straining alliances, and setting in motion a chain of occupation, insurgency, and sectarian conflict that would last far longer than the initial march to Baghdad.